8. Privies. The diarrh[oe]a and dysentery are produced, oftener than any other form of summer and autumnal disease, by the f[oe]tor of privies. During the revolutionary war, an American regiment, consisting of 600 men, were affected with a dysentery, from being encamped near a large mass of human fæces. The disease was suddenly checked by removing their encampment to a distance from it. Five persons in one family were affected with the yellow fever in Philadelphia, in 1805, who lived in a house in which a privy in the cellar emitted a most offensive smell. No one of them had been exposed to the foul air of Southwark, in which the fever chiefly prevailed in the autumn of that year. Three of them sickened at the same time, which obviated the suspicion of the disease being produced by contagion.
There are several other sources of malignant fevers besides those which have been mentioned. They are, exhalations from volcanoes, wells, and springs of water; also flesh[12], fish, and vegetables, eaten in a putrid state; but these seldom act in any country, and two of them only, and that rarely, in the United States.
[12] The following fact, communicated to me by Mr. Samuel Lyman, a member of congress from the state of Massachusetts, shows the importance of attending to the condition of butchers' meat in our attempts to prevent malignant fevers.
A farmer in New-Hampshire, who had overheated a fat ox by excessive labour in the time of harvest, perceiving him to be indisposed, instantly killed him, and sent his flesh to a neighbouring market. Of twenty four persons who ate of this flesh, fifteen died in a few days. The fatal disease produced by this aliment fell, with its chief force, upon the stomach and bowels.
The usual forms of the disease produced by miasmata from the sources of them which have been enumerated are,
5. Chronic, or what is called nervous fever.
In deriving all the above forms of disease from miasmata, I do not mean to insinuate, that sporadic cases of each of them are not produced by other causes.
In designating them by a single name, I commit no breach upon the ancient nomenclature of medicine. The gout affects not only the blood-vessels and bowels, but every other part of the body, and yet no writer has, upon that account, distinguished it by a plural epithet.